Dear Readers,
Spring is in the air. The trees are entering the process of rebirth and our radiators are shutting off. To remove the down comforter or not to remove…
The annual Wrights of Spring festival is coming up. Each playwright will receive two stage readings of their plays. Actors, Directors, Theatre managers, and designers all volunteer their time to new play development. It’s an exciting time filled with discovery and community–with third year writers, like me, at the center of the action.
In Winter Quarter I experienced my first doubts as a playwright. After half a decade of knowing that I want to write for the stage, I was due for a breakdown.
Process is something that Jordan and I focus on heavily in our dramaturgy, and I noticed that the diversity of processes was missing from my education as a playwright. I sought advice from various professors and professional playwrights.
The biggest thing I learned last quarter was that each project is unique and requires different tools to pull it along. This is why I believe it is important to hear from a variety of artists on their many different projects.
This quarter we are commissioning various dramaturgs and playwrights to write on their artistic processes. This will come up in our column “In Process.”
A second column that we are introducing is the brainchild of past Editor-in-Chief Trisha Mahoney: “Friends of the Grappler.” The new column will feature letters from alumni of The Grappler as they describe their post-graduate lives. It is only right that the debut article for this feature will come from Trisha.
Yours,
Emma Durbin
Dear Readers,
You may have noticed several changes to the look and aesthetic of the website. Over the last few months, we began several renovations and updates to the website, including our new color scheme and updated the logo, a purple “g” that ends with a hook. Bear with us as we continue to update and improve The Grappler’s website and aesthetic to serve the needs of our growing publication and the interests of our readers.
As we approach our ninth year as a publication housed in The Theatre School, it is with great pride that we announce that we have a permanent office space for meetings, office hours, and day-to-day operations. Our organization shares the office with our friends at the Prototypes Festival of Student Work and with the Literary Managers of Equity and Inclusion. The space is on the fourth floor of TTS in Room 428. Feel free to stop by and visit!
This quarter we will be focusing on the processes primarily of playwrights and dramaturges. In the humble beginnings of The Grappler, it was created as a space for students of TTS to grapple with the dramaturgical practice and experience in a university setting. Nine years later, I am the only remaining dramaturge on staff.
This in mind, we will continue to use dramaturgy as the beginning of our explorations in the many topics of theatre, art, and our personal stories, but we continue to expand our definition of what dramaturgy can mean.
Grapple on,
Jordan Scott Hardesty
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